Long And Winding Road
by Rainstorm Amaya Arianrhod
Summary: It was Sarralyn's mistakes and Sarralyn's pride that moulded her life. She spent twenty years of it in Tortall.


**A/N:** Observant persons will have noticed that a different story with the same title and summary was posted before. holds up hands Sorry, my bad. Anyway, this is another of my twenty years pieces.

**Disclaimer:** Only the twenty years challenge belongs to me. Even the notion of chimerism is thanks to a thread on The Dancing Dove.

**sarralynsarralynsarralynsarralynsarralyn**

**0 **

Sarralyn shifted before she was born. She did it all the time. It was as easy as breathing. She has her cruel streak, but she knows when she meets her match. Grandma is that match. Granda, of course, she knows she can wrap right round her little finger without a second thought, and she could do it then too. As a tiny baby, before she even chose her human form, before she was even truly Sarralyn, she shifted _porcupine squirrel kitten parrot dolphin_ because she liked to watch her parents' frantic attempts to keep her safe, alive, although she shifted again the moment she felt that the shape she was in was becoming life-endangering. She liked to know they cared enough for that, she liked to know she was loved.

**5**

Sarralyn was five and already people avoided her. In fact, there were only ten or eleven who could be said _not_ to avoid her. These included her mother, father and brother, the first two of which were more powerful in their respective fields then her, and the last of which having a happy nature and a saving grace of charm, much more so than Sarralyn, who knew she could easily blast Rikash to the Divine Realms, but didn't, because she thought that it might be a better idea to wait until she was big enough to run away afterwards. Meanwhile, she occupied herself with books, and lessons. Sarralyn liked books. Five-year-old fingers might not be nimble enough to mend them, but Sarralyn didn't care. Actually, by this time, Sarralyn didn't care about much.

**10**

When Sarralyn was seven there had been a brief movement by some audacious children her age to call her Sarra, or Lyn, but when their efforts were met with a blank stare they gave up. Sarralyn was proud of that blank stare. It had taken her two months to perfect it, and it was her standard response to questions such as "Come on, Sarralyn, surely even you need to eat?" "Sarralyn, can I read that book?" "Sarralyn, do you want to come on a walk with us?" and finally, most annoyingly to Sarralyn's mind, "Sarralyn, why is that tree cinders?" (It wasn't her fault... she'd only tried a spell... it'd missed... sorry, sorry, sorry...) This was the point where Sarralyn started to descend into the uncontrollable girl with magic and fewer scruples than were strictly necessary, because in her reading, she'd discovered why she had both, the peculiar mix of wild magic and the Gift. She was a chimera- she could have been two, and instead she was one. She could have been a twin, and instead she was just one girl. Sarralyn liked the thought; not for nothing was her favourite saying 'two brains are better than one'. Funnily enough, in her dreams of greatness, being special Sarralyn, powerful Sarralyn- she never spared a thought for whom the other being half of her genes might have been part of could have been.

**15**

Sarralyn was a good-looking teenager. She'd inherited her mother's large grey-blue eyes, although Daine's never looked so much as if they didn't give a damn about your personal wellbeing, something of her father's height and grace, and many of her mother's features. Her hair was nearly black like her father's, curly, tangled, thick and attacked every morning with several combs missing a certain number of teeth, and an impressive collection of hair ties and pins. She also had a certain je ne sais quoi, a mystique that she had cultivated in order to keep people out of her way, because if Sarralyn socialised at all it was with other mages, generally much older than her. She avoided Nat, Gareth Nathaniel of Naxen, after an embarrassing incident when she was fourteen (she hadn't realised he liked her), Rikash avoided his sister by dint of spending a lot of time with Lianokami, who neither avoided nor sought Sarralyn out, she didn't have to try and avoid the irritatingly altruistic Kasumi and Frank because they were too busy as pages, and her mother... Sarralyn and Daine held a truce of silence; Daine hadn't approved of that cold-blooded use of magic in the face of a desperate Nat, but she had understood the sudden flash of panic that took Sarralyn over when Nat cornered her. Now, Sarralyn's ears always hovered on the edge between bat and human, ready to catch any flicker of talk about her, any sound of an approaching person, for Sarralyn, although quiet in a dangerous sort of way, not quite malicious, still had those tiny glimmers of fear, still liked to know exactly what was going on around her; ultimately, Sarralyn was a girl/woman/not quite either with an insatiable curiousity. This was how she heard George remark, just the once, that if Sarralyn was like anyone else he knew, it was his grandson Junim. Sarralyn had thought she was unique; now she found that she wanted to know whom it was that was so similar to her.

**20**

When Sarralyn was twenty, she got her wish, in a left-handed kind of way. Because Sarralyn had finally snapped. She had done something everyone, even she knew was wrong, wrong, wrong. _She hadn't meant to blast her brother_. She hadn't known it was him. She hadn't realised that the aura of power she had felt moving her way, the unfamiliar-yet-tugging-at-her-senses magic, the power that had come closer and closer and stopped outside her door, was Rikash. He'd been away so long, and his power had increased so much, that she hadn't recognised him- and she'd blasted him where he stood. Rikash had been shielded, thankfully, but her magic had torn through it, and now he lay still and pale in a bed in the infirmary, sleeping all the time to try and compensate for his near-death experience- she hated herself when she saw him. She felt as if she had done something unpardonable, even though Rikash, the first time he woke up had said he forgave her- and didn't that make it worse? Sarralyn hadn't known that she cared. And even though she was forgiven she paced the corridors, chose an indoor practice court and paced that, lighting candles, small fires, making hundreds of light globes, bleeding off little bits of power at a time, because she never wanted to be able to do that again. It began to make her sick; she was paler than usual, less robust, quieter, her eyes permanently red-rimmed by the tears that came to her whenever she thought about Rikash, months away from healing. Numair spotted it first; he had tried to do the same once, and he knew that Sarralyn could quickly waste away to nothing. So he talked to Alanna about Sarralyn, reasoning that if anyone knew anything about survivor's guilt and the resultant effects on mages it would be her, who talked to George, who remembered something and sent a fast message to Aly. Aly arranged a passage to the Copper Isles, and without any of the fuss that everyone expected, Sarralyn boarded the ship, spending a few days showing that she was indeed very much like her father by being very seasick. The crew refused to permit her to do anything whatsoever with either Gift or wild magic, following Aly's implicit, if by proxy, instructions, so Sarralyn slowly regained some of her strength. When she reached the Copper Isles, she wobbled off the ship, refusing assistance- Sarralyn was still proud, even half-broken by her own actions. She stood, swaying on the dock, and a man came forward, towards her, melting out of the crowd. Tall, even taller than Sarralyn. Tanned, maybe sun-burnt, a good mage. Dark eyes and hair. "I'm Junim," he said. "You must be Sarralyn; I think we're adoptive cousins of some order." He hugged her swiftly, no more than a cousinly greeting. "I hear you blasted your brother," he said, and she could see he knew exactly what she'd done and it didn't change the way he thought of her. And Sarralyn broke down and cried.


End file.
